Skip to main content

Applying BERT on the Classification of Chinese Legal Documents

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Advances in Internet, Data & Web Technologies (EIDWT 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes on Data Engineering and Communications Technologies ((LNDECT,volume 161))

  • 404 Accesses

Abstract

Chinese Legal documents contain complex underlying facts, controversies and legal application issues that make most domestic legal document retrieval platforms perform poorly in terms of relevance and accuracy. In this paper, we try to evaluate the performance of BERT on Chinese legal document classification. The data set for this paper is obtained from the legal judgment documents of a single charge on China Judicial Documents Network, with a total of 8 accusations and 2454 legal cases. The experimental result shows that the BERT performs much better than FastText, TextCNN, and RNN on our data set, obtaining a classification accuracy of 0.89.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 229.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 299.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Kong, J., Wang, J., Zhang, X.: Hierarchical BERT with an adaptive fine-tuning strategy for document classification. Knowl. Based Syst. 238, 107872 (2022)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Anna, R., Olga, K., Anna, R.: A primer in BERTology: what we know about how BERT works. Trans. Assoc. Comput. Linguist. 8, 842–866 (2021)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Patricoski, J., et al.: An evaluation of pretrained BERT models for comparing semantic similarity across unstructured clinical trial texts. Stud. Health Technol. Inform. 289, 18–21 (2022)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Ding, M., Zhou, C., Yang, H., et al.: CogLTX: applying BERT to long texts. In: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33, pp. 12792–12804 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Barros, L., Trifan, A., Oliveira, J.L.: VADER meets BERT: Sentiment analysis for early detection of signs of self-harm through social mining. In: CEUR Workshop Proceedings, vol. 2936 (2021)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Zhang, W.: Research on criminal judgment. Renmin University of China (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Bansal, N., Sharma, A., Singh, R.K.: An evolving hybrid deep learning framework for legal document classification. Ingénierie des Systèmes d’Information 24(4), 425–431 (2019)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Chen, H., Wu, L., Chen, J., Lu, W., Ding, J.: A comparative study of automated legal text classification using random forests and deep learning. Inf. Process. Manag. 59(2), 102798 (2022)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Ma, Y., Zhang, P., Ma, J.: An ontology driven knowledge block summarization approach for Chinese judgment document classification. IEEE Access 6, 71327–71338 (2018)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Devlin, J., Chang, M.W., Lee, K., et al.: BERT: pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.04805 (2018)

  11. Jing, Y., Wang, M.Y., Zhou, W.Y.: Research on text summary extraction algorithm based on BBCM-TextRank. J. Northeast Normal Univ. (Nat. Sci. Ed.) 54(03), 67–75 (2022). https://doi.org/10.16163/j.cnki.dslkxb202107310001

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgement

This research was funded by National Funds of Social Science (21BXW076), National Natural Science Foundation of China (61602518), Philosophy and Social Science Research Project of Hubei Provincial Department of Education (20G026), Innovation Research of Young Teachers of Central Universities in 2021 (2722021BZ040), The Key Social Science Projects in Wuhan in 2021 (2021010), Prof. Liu Yaqi’s Outstanding Youth Innovation team Construction Project (Big Data Intelligent Information Processing and Application Technology Innovation Team) and School-level reform project of Zhongnan University of Economics and Law (YB202158).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Xu Chen .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Zhang, Q., Chen, X. (2023). Applying BERT on the Classification of Chinese Legal Documents. In: Barolli, L. (eds) Advances in Internet, Data & Web Technologies. EIDWT 2023. Lecture Notes on Data Engineering and Communications Technologies, vol 161. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26281-4_21

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics